All posts tagged ‘play’

This video totally explains my childhood. And by “childhood,” I mean my entire life.

The Floor Is Lava was always a favorite at our house. My riding in the car game was imagining the world as a giant beach ball and we were balancing on top like a circus elephant. Stairs had to be climbed with the same number of treads per step. I don’t recommend starting 3 at a time unless it’s a short flight or your have super legs. Bonus points for no remainder.

This new app from Chris O’Shea, a British artist and designer, is a great digital toy for children because it takes the screen and encourages it to be something else. O’Shea’s commitment to inventing new approaches that explore play, human behavior, and engagement through interaction design and the visual arts is exactly what we need as children’s digital play is inspired to move beyond the screen and explore the space where their virtual and real worlds collide.

Makego offers different vehicles with different drivers that will bring the car you design to life as you interact with the drivers and their world through animations and sound.

The current version has three vehicles to play with: a race car, ice-cream truck, and river boat. Chris says that there will be more vehicles coming. Hopefully, we will also see a lot more apps that encourage children to use the screen, to help get beyond it and integrate virtual and real world play.

With the holidays in full swing and stores brimming with crazed parents scrambling to pickup the hottest toys, we thought we’d take a break from the Mall Madness and Plastic Pandemonium to propose a saner, greener, cheaper, and uniqu(er) alternative: a Digital Toy Box. Sure, mobile phones and tablets are great for digital games like Pac-Man and Angry Birds, but with their large touchscreens, microphones, and GPS sensors they’re also quickly becoming amazing platforms for digital TOYS.

With this in mind, GeekDad’s Daniel Donahoo and Launchpad Toy’s Andy Russell have put together the following Top 10 list of our favorite apps for open-ended, creative, constructive, and exploratory play – not just substitutes for plastic toys, but tools that empower kids to create, learn, and share through play.

So have at it, parents! Drop those car keys, put away the wrapping paper, and build your kids a Digital Toy Box!

Drums and triangles giving you a headache? Try this wonderful beat sequencer that enables kids to create and share their own songs through a whimsical and playful interface that (bonus!) teaches them a bit about rhythm, tempo, and tone along the way!

For those of us who always struggled to position the marble just so in your index finger before flicking it into the circle, you can now introduce your kids to the grand old schoolyard game of marbles. This is an addictive game of marbles for up to four players. It encourages group gameplay around your mobile device and tests those fine motor skills as you have to weight the marble just right to get maximum points.

Of course, we’d be remiss if we didn’t include Launchpad Toys’ own app, Toontastic, on this list. Just like dolls, puppets, and action figures, Toontastic makes it easy to create your own stories through play – EXCEPT now you can actually record your stories as animated cartoons complete with narration and share them online via ToonTube! Ok, we’ll stop now… but check it out yourself (it’s free) – you’ll be amazed at what kids have created and shared.

This sophisticatedly simple electronic coloring book offers great story starters and then actually brings your drawings to life by animating them as part of mini-scene cartoons. Beautifully designed, intuitive, and lots of FUN – perfect for the young storyteller/illustrator in all of us.

Second only to Grandpa’s Workshop, this confoundingly addictive physics puzzler challenges kids to invent and solve their own Rube Goldberg machines using stuff they’d find around the house like tennis balls and tin cans. Great for any budding inventor/engineer!

When I first visited the Exertion Games Lab in Melbourne, Australia, I felt like I was walking into my own little corner of the fictional town Eureka. Amid the screens and wires and different projects in the various corners of the lab there was a commitment from the students and staff there to actively making the future not only a better place, but a fun one as well. That is my kind of future.

The Exertion Games Lab at RMIT, Melbourne, is doing terrific work in infusing play with physical activity. The work coming out of the lab highlights that if we think physical gaming stops at Kinect or Wii we are limiting the potential of how games can engage us in physical ways. We are only at the very beginning of thinking and adapting the ways technology supports us to physically engage with the world.

The Exertion Games Lab has been developed and is run by Florian ‘Floyd’ Mueller who has been researching and exploring the space between physicality and technology well before the mainstreaming of exertion gaming through the Nintendo Wii. His study and work extends over 18 years and includes working at institutions such as Stanford University, MIT Media Lab, Media Lab Europe, Microsoft Research, Xerox Parc, the University of Melbourne and the University of London. But, what Floyd imparts most when you talk to him is the importance of injecting the fun of gaming into activity that supports physical health and well-being. His portfolio covers rehabilitation, distance gaming and exercise and other projects worth checking out.

Currently, Floyd is supporting students and researchers to create their own exertion games and they are doing some terrific work. So, what can we expect from gaming in the future when we look at the work of students and post-grads at the Exertion Games Lab?

A group of first year students have developed an exertion game based around making indoor rock climbing more challenging. They used motion sensor technology to project an animation on a rock climbing wall that had rocks falling from above and a river rising from below. Players have to climb the rock climbing wall while dodging falling rocks or they would lose health points. They also couldn’t be too slow or the rising water would catch them. This game was developed before the release of Microsoft’s Kinect, so the students are now working in the Lab to improve and explore the potential of Kinect technology on their design.

It is a great achievement from students who’ve only recently walked out of high school. Who knows what they’ll come up with next?

One of the most enjoyable games I’ve been a part of in recent times has been an Alternate Reality Game (ARG) being run by an innovative teacher from Australia. We usually think of ARGs as large scale, requiring lots of resources and being part of a marketing campaign for a new movie – or as some funky, alternative techy game that the cool kids play. But it doesn’t have to be.

Jess McCulloch teaches Mandarin in Australian schools and she sent me a tweet asking if my boys (aged 7 and 9 years) might be interested in a game that teaches them about how languages are structured. Of course I said yes. All she needed to begin was our home address and the boys’ names.

The next thing that happened… we received a letter in the mail addressed to my kids. They didn’t recognize the handwriting and they curiously opened it. What they found was an A4 sheet of paper with a Chinese Character on it, and a URL. They were puzzled. My eldest suggested we type the URL into the computer and when we did we were opened up to a world of secret agents, lessons on language and mission after mission that would help them solve the mystery of the character on their piece of paper.

Jess has created an an ARG targeting younger school children called “The Blackline Mystery.” Through email and live Skype sessions with her “virtual agents” she sets missions that they must complete online. She uses video and letters in the mail to give the game a stronger sense of reality and in doing so has my children hooked. They have set up their own agent email and are spending time working their way through missions to gain the next clues about the mysterious character they received in the post. This beats homework hands down – and I’m happy for them to work on this rather than homework because they are engaged and willing participants in a game, developing their digital media literacy skills, their problem solving skills and improving their literacy, their numeracy and understanding things about how languages develop. What Jess demonstrates is that an ARG doesn’t need a huge budget. With a good plot, some free web-based tools and the willingness to invest some time, teachers and parents can create playful and immersive environments for their children to learn in.

I’ve wanted to be part of an ARG since I went to an event on transmedia in Melbourne and heard Steve Peters, a Senior Designer at Fourth Wall Studios talking about an ARG he played that involved going out to a local park and looking for something which was buried. It was the afternoon and raining and he invited his teenage daughter to go with him to look for something in the park. They drove there, wandered around getting wet in the rain and eventually – after a few tries – dug up a canister. In the car, drying themselves off, Steve’s daughter opened the canister to find a digital camera with photos on it (the next clue in the ARG). She said to her Dad, “I feel like I’m in a movie.” Continue Reading “Alternate Reality Gaming for Kids” »

Today’s children sit more than ever. Babies spend hours confined in car seats and carriers rather than crawling, toddling or being carried. As they get older their days are often heavily scheduled between educational activities and organized events. Children have 25 percent less time for free play than they did a generation ago, and that’s before factoring in distractions like TV or video games.

Left to their own devices, children move. They hold hands and whirl in a circle till they fall down laughing. They beg to take part in interesting tasks with adults. They want to face challenges and try again after making mistakes. They snuggle. They climb, dig and run. Stifling these full body needs actually impairs their ability to learn.

The internet of things is here. It exists in our phones, our televisions, our pens, our tablets – and now in the most basic of play things, the building block.

I’ve been waiting for the arrival of Sifteo cubes since I saw David Merrill’s TED talk about “siftables” two years ago. Well, the wait is over and they are here … almost. Sifteo cubes are blocks with screens, that interact with each other and your computer over a wireless USB radio link. They are described by their creators as “intelligent play” and you can see that they could really get people interested in tabletop gaming with a tech bent. But I’m interested — like many others according to David Merrill — about the educational potential of these new play things.

The cubes were the idea of two geek dads, David Merrill and Jeevan Kalanithi, who studied together at Stanford but were both at MIT Media Labs obsessing over human and technology interaction and user interfaces. It was over a discussion about the way we use our hands differently on computers (this was a discussion before the proliferation of touch screens) than in real life that they began to “riff” on the question: what if we engaged with technology based devices in the same way we engage with a pile of LEGO? Continue Reading “Sifteo Cubes: Redesigning Play for Geeklets” »

Toontastic is a great example of how mobile devices like the iPad can bring kids and parents together through Intergenerational Play. Technology as a learning tool has received its fair share of negative press. While recognising it is more engaging and immersive than television, the mix of computers, consoles and handheld devices have been regarded as lacking emotion, isolating and insular. But, this has more to do with the design of the tools themselves and how we have positioned them in our homes and our lives than the technology platforms themselves. Computers have been tucked in corners, or put in the kids room. We have encouraged the use of headphones to block out noise and place the tech user in their own aural world – shut off from our questions and engaging conversation. It doesn’t have to be like this. Sure, we can use iPads for some respite sometimes, but an app like Toontastic shows that we can play with our children using technology. We can laugh and engage with technology as an enabler.

“Mom! I can spell your name!” Look at him: Only four years old and fearlessly riding the wave of the future. Given my druthers, he’d be running around outside with other neighborhood kids, getting dizzy spinning on a swing, or climbing up a curly slide. Sunshine and fresh air, right?

The problem is that we can no longer trust the ‘village’ to help raise our children. As a result, unsupervised outdoor playtime is generally off-limits to young children and risky for teens. It’s sad, but not a complete disaster because kids today have options that were unavailable to previous generations. And that’s exactly as it should be.

What’s unchanged is the way some grown-ups still have a hard time keeping up with kids. “Oh my! Average teens text 3339 times per month!” I’m not sure I send fewer messages per month along such old fashioned lines as email, yet I’m supposed to be shocked that tech savvy youth are massive communicators? No, they’re just doing what they like, as kids are wont to do.

A few months back, I was asked to provide input in the planning phases for a global survey on the play patterns of kids, funded by the folks at Swedish retailer Ikea. To an extent, Ikea sanctioned the report as a resource for helping them understand how to develop and market their products, but they have also released the results to help inform and enlighten parents and the public at large about what our kids and we are really thinking about what it means to play. The results are surprising, and rather positive when it comes to what kids really want to do.

Five major takeaways from the PlayReport:

Children overwhelmingly prefer playing with their friends and parents over watching TV.
When children across the world were asked to choose between watching TV or playing with friends or parents, they overwhelmingly choose to play with friends (89%) and parents (73%) with TV a very poor substitute for social interaction at only 11%.

Nearly half of the parents think play should be educational. Children disagree.
Nearly half (45%) of all parents think that play is best when it’s educational. This rises to two thirds of parents in China, Slovakia, Czech Rep, Spain, Hungary, Russia, Poland and Portugal. A further minority at 17% (China, Italy, Russia and US) actually prefer their children to learn things rather than to simply play. 27% think play should always have a purpose. As for the children, 51% actually prefer to play rather than learn.

Parents are too stressed to play.
45% of parents surveyed agree that they feel they don’t have enough time to play with their children. Even when parents do find the time to play, a significant minority feel too distracted by other concerns to enjoy it; 26% agree that they are ‘too stressed to enjoy it’.

A majority of parents want more creativity at home for their children. The question is how?
89% of parents agree that play is important to encourage their child’s imagination and creativity. And almost all, 93% agree that it’s an essential part of the way a child develops. And 71% feel that they should ‘encourage more creativity at home’, but that they don’t know how.

Not all parents want their children to be happy.
72% of parents selected happiness as single most important wish for their children. But what about the other 28%? Well, financial success came second and thoughtfulness of
others a close third.